Did a bit of research on the Peugeot
307 today. The results were surprising. It seems that a car like the one I saw yesterday has a street value of $2,900,
not the $7,999 that Bailey had been asking, nor even the $4,999 to which he had marked it
down. That's enough to give up already. Later I looked in at Ballarat Automative and spoke to Paul Sperber, who told
me that he didn't service them, and echoed my concerns about maintenance of old European
cars. So that one's dead. A pity for one thing only: the large, low rear cargo area.

Off walking with the dogs, in a bit of a hurry before leaving for town. I had given them
until 13:42 to turn back. But we got half way and Nikolai jumped onto the side of the road and came out with this (taken later after we
returned):

Into town yet again, mainly for Yvonne to see the doctor, but
while we were there we both had our hair cut.

Paul Smith (the doctor) had, to his obvious annoyance, not received the documentation of the
case from the base hospital, but he had seen
the X-rays taken yesterday, and based on
them he was surprised to see Yvonne on her feet. Another confirmation that things are on
the right track, though he took the trouble—probably necessary—to remind her that just
feeling better doesn't mean that she has recovered, and there will be at least another 3
months before things are back to normal.

While I was there I asked for a renewal for
my telmisartan (for high blood
pressure). That requires an obligatory blood pressure measurement, which proved to be
105/60, a little low for Paul's liking. So there's the possibility that I will have to
reduce the dose or stop taking the stuff. First I need to measure more often. In the
evening I measured 122/66 and 126/68. That's definitely not too low
for systolic, but what
about diastolic? Or is
it just my device?

Various mail from eBay today. First, one that
was completely unintelligible. The Subject: line was “Subject: eBay will begin
intermediating payments on its Marketplace platform”.

What does that mean? Looking up in the OED didn't
help. The verb “intermediate” (with long last vowel: /ɪntəˈmiːdɪeɪt/) has four meanings,
only one of which is in common use: “To act between others; to mediate.” So we need a
direct and an indirect object. But here I only get one:

eBay is happy to announce plans to further improve the customer experience by
intermediating payments on our Marketplace platform. In doing so, eBay will manage the
payments flow, simplifying the end-to-end experience for both buyers and sellers.

It takes a fair amount of reading and thought to discover that they use the word
“intermediate” to mean “processing”. What a Marketplace platform is is left to the
interpretation of the reader, who is (as they say) experienced.

Put that into the “too hard” category until I received a mail from Statista:

Going back to the eBayese message, it became clear: they're changing their preferred payment
processor. And somewhere in there, that's what they say, but only after your eyes glaze
over.

More interesting, though, is the
graph. PayPal is growing by leaps and
bounds, while eBay is stagnating. Not surprising, I suppose, based on my “customer
experience”.

As if to emphasize that experience, I received another message:

Account security notice - Immediate action required

To help protect your account from unauthorised use, we’ve reset your eBay password and
secret questions. We do this when we believe that your eBay password and username or email
address have been obtained without your permission. Currently, eBay doesn’t have any
knowledge about how this information may have happened. There are a number of ways to
obtain this information. For example, someone may send emails claiming to be from a
company that you do business with and then coerce you to reveal your personal
information. Visiting harmful web pages that install malware on your computer can also put
your personal information at risk.

They've changed their text, or maybe this is code for something else. Maybe it's just to
punish me for having such bad thoughts about them. Previously this happened when I accessed
their web site in a manner which, presumably, they didn't like. This time, based on the
sender timestamp, it happened while we were walking the dogs, definitely not close to any
action I took on the site. Could it be that somebody is really accessing my account? I
have my suspicions about klearview_au, about whom I have heard of other fraud, but
it seems unlikely that they could access my password information, which is only stored at
home.

And the “secret questions”? I've ranted about their stupidity in the past, not just on
eBay's part: “Who do you work for?”, “Who is your best friend?”, and “What is your
favorite vacation spot?“. What good are they? I have never had the pleasure of
using them. I can post them here because the answers are in no way related to the question,
which I consider as a key. And now I have one more password that has nothing in common with
the others except that it reflects my opinion of the company.

Off into Ballarat for the fourth time
this week, Yvonne for physiotherapy, and I to the dentist.
In each case, there wasn't much to report. It looks like this will be a weekly occurrence
for Yvonne for a the next few weeks.

A few days ago I put up our old, flaky TV for giveaway on Freecycle, and I had a couple
of people interested in it. The first had planned to pick it up today, but I heard nothing
from him, so when somebody
in Sebastopol showed
interest, I tried to contact him by email and phone, but failed on both counts. OK, we're
going to town anyway, so why not take it with us? The place was in Albert St, the main
road, so it was really no difficulty.

Saturday evening dinner tonight, with Chris Bahlo (late as usual), but this time also with
Amber. So I took a panorama, which failed. I didn't close the space between Chris and
myself, with disastrous results:

OK, it behaved as advertised, so I didn't pay much attention. But now I have a bug report about the
same thing, with the additional information that this was
with clang 6.0, something that I haven't
been able to find in the automated report.

This has all the hallmarks of a C++
incompatibility. The source code hasn't changed for a year, and then it was only a patch.
It must be the compiler.

Dammit, once upon a time it was possible to understand the syntax of a program. What we
have here, as far as I can see, is all inside vigra—all we have done so far is read in the header files—and “it works for me” with
an older version of clang. I'm beginning to develop a deep hatred of clang and C++: clang
is so concerned with itself that it accounts for the majority of the buildworld
target when building a new system, and it seems so sensitive that each new version causes
some incompatibility.

And I learnt C++ nearly 30 years ago, and gradually came to the conclusion that it didn't
offer what it seemed to, so I reverted to C. I discussed this in this diary nearly 14 years ago, but since then it has only
got worse. So now I need to climb in to the maze of twisty little header files, all
different, and work out what this version of clang doesn't like.

Sigh. This is a machine that I have kept as close to the original installation as
possible, just upgrading from source every so often. What went wrong here? How do I fix
it? I think the obvious thing is to grab a recent ISO image from the ftp site and install
that. But why is this all so painful?

By coincidence, there's a new version of Hugin available, 2018.0.0. Or is that 2018.0? It proved to be the latter,
a POLA violation, since the previous version
was called 2017.0.0, and the pathname for the source tarballs included parts of both
schemes. Built it anyway. Apart from that and the deliberate breakage in not allowing to
build the binaries in the same directory (that's easily patched, not nearly as easy to
convince T.Modes that it's breakage and that portable software doesn't need patches), it
built with no problems.

And then in the evening I received confirmation: yes, the name was wrong, should have been
2018.0.0. Fixed. So tomorrow I can do it all over again.

It's been a few days since I've updated my network
statistics page, and it's now showing a very clear pattern of congestion from 18:00 to
24:00. There are still a number of loose ends, in particular the question of
whether ICMP
packet loss has any particular relationship
to TCP packet loss.

That's only a small part of the total, omitting sockets that function
normally. OOORcv are out-of-order receives, in principle harmless,
but Rexmit (retransmit) implies a packet drop. It's interesting to note that there
are dropped packets on local NFS connections too.

Clearly netstat must get this information from the kernel somehow. Spent some time
looking through the code, with the rather confusing result that I couldn't find where it got
the information from. It must be done by some library call, and I haven't found out where
yet. But that's clearly the way to go to find real-world statistics.

Leonid vomited copiously a couple of times
today. The mass included much grass, bones (presumably from chicken frames), and sinew
(presumably from beef). Apart from that, he looked fine, but he wasn't hungry in the
evening. It won't do him any harm to go without food for a day, but clearly we need to keep
an eye on him.

Into the office this morning to find that my packet loss rates had gone through the roof
round midnight. Looking at the raw data, I found packet drop rates of up to 75%, and
several TCP
sessions had timed out. This doesn't match the regular pattern I had been seeing so far.
But why don't Aussie Broadband and
the National Broadband Network know about
this stuff? It seems that neither of them have monitoring in place.

Time to complain? No, I don't like those packet drop rates for a different reason: they're
implausibly high. Even 2% or 3% causes severe performance issues, but I'm not seeing
anything that severe. Time to look at netstat again and coax it to produce
useful real-world
(TCP) packet loss
information.

It ran well enough, and despite temperatures similar to last time I drove it, the air
conditioner worked normally. Did it maybe cut out last time because of overheating? In any
case, when I got
to Sebastopol, there was
coolant all over the place:

Where did it come from? There's nothing obvious, and it was spread from one side of the car
to the other. Paul thinks that it might be the radiator header tank, and that it might not
be that expensive to repair, so I'll wait for his verdict.

Leonid behaved fairly normally today, but in
the evening he didn't want to eat at all. Clearly there's something wrong
there—constipation?—and so we made an appointment with the Golden Plains Vet Practice tomorrow morning.

Up in the morning to find Leonid looking much
worse than yesterday evening. He had bled from some orifice overnight, he had foam at the
mouth—I think because of dehydration—and he didn't want to get up. We had an appointment
in Bannockburn, Victoria at
10:00, but in view of his condition we called up and arranged to bring him immediately,
still only arriving at 9:20. Bridie Bond, now a qualified vet, took a look at him. By that time he was looking a lot better,
almost normal, and it was difficult to tell what was wrong, though she established that the
bleeding was from the anus, and that it was not fresh, suggesting it had come down from
further up. She called in Greg Coates, another vet who isn't on their web page, and he thought it might be
haemorrhagic
gastroenteritis, apparently related
to Clostridium, a genus I knew
from Clostridium
difficile. Since he hadn't passed any faeces since Monday evening, we considered a
blockage, so they arranged to keep him, hydrate him and take some X-rays.

We're a little concerned that the problem may be related to his diet, in particular the raw
chicken frames. There were clear bits of bone in his vomit on Monday, and I was concerned
that he might have a blockage or a perforation. Greg noted that there had been a recent
study from some institution
in Melbourne that concluded that
chicken was bad for dogs.

OK, what to feed them? They don't really like the chicken frames anyway. Later on, picked
up the week's beef from Whitey's
in Sebastopol, and spoke to
Tim Winter, who tells me that the study from Melbourne was politically motivated to
discourage the creation of some chicken meat processing facility in
central Victoria. He also told me that
he sells about 250 tons of chicken frames a year (that's 5 tons a week!), which is also
interesting because they cost $8 for 10 kg, while Yvonne has
been going to Davis Wholesale to pay
$10 for what appear to be identically the same things. Left with 5 kg of beef cubes and
food for thought.

Back home I looked up haemorrhagic gastroenteritis, which proved to be (marginally) related
to Clostridium
perfringens, though the symptoms described there are only marginally similar to what Leo
has.

Call back from Bridie in the late afternoon: he's better, but not good, and they wanted to
do more X-rays with Barium
sulphate to confirm the lack of blockage that they didn't find with the first X-ray.
And for that he'll have to stay overnight.

Later in to Ballarat to take Yvonne to the physiotherapists and to do the shopping. Most of that
went pretty quickly, except for one item: black bread. Yvonne told me on the phone that
it's in the “European” section, but I couldn't even find that, only “International” (as
opposed to “Mexican”, meaning “Tex-Mex”, and “Asian”, meaning “East Asian”). But I couldn't
find any there:

No, nothing there. Assistant went off and asked. Came back: no, no idea where it could be.
Is it Dutch, maybe? No, not really. Something
like Pumpernickel? Well, yes, and
in fact some of the stuff we bought had been incorrectly labeled pumpernickel. Ah, that's
another matter. That's Dutch, so it's with the Dutch food:

My network performance is still not good, though it's not as regular as I thought. But how
do I report it? I'm not happy with the packet drop measurements I have been making, and so
far I haven't got round to hacking netstat to produce the kind of information I want.
But there's a standard test that every [IR]SP seems to use: Speedtest. So updating Monday's measurements, I now have

Date

Time

Latency (ms)

Jitter (ms)

Download kb/s

Upload kb/s

5 February 2018

13:37:33

20

16

23358

4514

5 February 2018

13:39:25

21

3

23573

4569

5 February 2018

13:41:54

24

20445

4530

6 February 2018

9:31:30

32

40

6239

280

7 February 2018

19:19:13

25

4222

4026

7 February 2018

22:16:08

30

74

7783

1298

It's difficult to correlate these values with my graphs, but it's clear that the last three
results are unacceptable. Yesterday's measurement (6 February) corresponds with a
particularly bad spike in packet loss and latency, while the other two were in the evening
and may be typical for the time. But what's causing it? Should I care? Maybe: it's good
to be armed against spurious explanations, most mainly (strangely) blaming me.

Looking out the window this morning when I got up, the garden bed looked particularly wet.
Time to reduce the sprinkler time? Not quite: the sprinkler was still going, and had been
for at least 3 hours.

Dammit, has my sprinkler program hung or crashed? A known bug issue is that if
the program stops abnormally, it won't turn the sprinkler off. But no, the program wasn't
running, and the sprinkler relay was off. No crash. Power cycled the relay board.
Nothing. The sprinkler solenoid itself had stuck on.

That's not the first time I've had that problem. In fact, this particular solenoid was a
replacement for one that failed, purchased conveniently just over 12 months ago, so that the
warranty had expired.

Turned off the water and waited several hours for the area round the solenoid to dry out.
Nothing obviously wrong with it. Turned the water on again. Sprinkler off, so the solenoid
was off.

So I grabbed ten of them: if they're no good, I can always take them back. Today I tried
one. Not bad, but not really more than a single helping the way I eat it, and I'm not sure
it's enough even then. Admittedly, I put in 110 g of noodles instead of the specified 75 g.
I'll try another some time soon.

External disk drives now almost invariably come with a 5 V power adapter that plugs directly
into the mains and delivers power to the disk via a 2.1 mm IEC 60130-10 type
A connector (and not the 2.5 mm variety). And clearly I get one with every disk I
buy.

But where are they? Disks die much faster than power adapters, but I have many more disks
than adapters, and it's becoming a nuisance.

OK, off to eBay to buy a few. What do you
call them? Wall wart? None found. Power supply? No, that has too many false positives.
Finally eBay told me: Power adaptor. But even then, just about every adapter had a
different connector, mainly ones I have never seen. I still haven't found something that I
thought you could find on every street corner.

Call from Greg Coates this morning, saying that Leonid was doing well, and that I could probably pick him up in the afternoon. That
proved to be the case, so off
to Bannockburn in
mid-afternoon, where Greg showed us the numerous X-rays that he had taken, not all of which
looked as good to me as they did to him. Asked for him to send them to us, but that doesn't
seem to be normal any more—he suggested taking a photo with a mobile phone, but promised how
to investigate getting us the originals. Also discussed Pene Kirk's suggestion that it
could be pancreatitis. No,
counterindicated by the blood.

Back home, Leo was pretty much as normal, and showed (not surprisingly) quite a hunger.
Looks like we're over the hill, but arranged to take him to Pene Kirk tomorrow morning.

But otherwise the recipe didn't look bad, if a bit simple, like a simplification of my
sweet and sour fish recipe. I
modified it a little, and added more of the sauce ingredients. It didn't taste bad, but
there wasn't enough sauce! That's really surprising; I'd expect them to want more, not
less. But then, maybe I don't understand the terms tbsp and tsp, or maybe I interpreted them
incorrectly.

Leonid is looking a lot better. He was still
hungry after eating last night, not surprising in view of how little he had eaten over the
last few days, so I gave him some more of the “sensitivity control” food that we had got at the vets. He didn't eat much of it,
possibly because he wasn't used to eating at that time of the morning. After that off
to Cape Clear this morning
to show him to Pene Kirk, who confirmed that she thought he might have had a bout
of pancreatitis, and that bleeding
was no counterindication.

In the evening, I gave him some boiled beef and rice, and he ate normally, making an
incredible mess. Nikolai came along to tidy
up. And then I realized why Leo has such difficulty eating crumbs: he doesn't use his
tongue, possibly because his canine teeth are too close together.

In the past I've noticed that there was not much difference between the various pastes.
This one is definitely different: it's much worse. It's almost uncomfortably pedas, and has
little flavour. I have two more helpings, which I'll try to temper with more coconut milk.
And then never again.

“Twenty-seven client-owned dogs suffering from suspected APN and 47 healthy dogs,
client-owned or owned by staff members” took part in the investigation. That doesn't
look overly exhaustive.

“In addition, a significant association was detected between dogs affected by APN and
the consumption of raw chicken (96% of APN cases; 26% of control dogs)”

This is a declaration of bankruptcy. If they want to investigate the effect of raw
chicken, the control dogs should also have been chosen to eat raw chicken. They're not
hard to find. As Tim Winter tells me, he sells chicken frames by the ton.

There's no discussion of the prevalence of APN. They write “we are under the impression
that ... the incidence of APN is possibly higher in Australia than in other countries.”

“Under the impression”? That's a cop-out. Measurements, please. The ... relate to the
consumption of raw chicken, so they're basing this assumption on the apparently higher
consumption in Australia. That's upside down. If you want to prove that APN is related
to consumption of raw chicken, you should measure things, not gain impressions.

“Fecal [sic] samples were positive for Campylobacter spp. in 13 of 27 of the APN
cases compared with 11 of 47 cases in the control group”. Is that such a big
difference?

“Sequencing was available in 10 of 13 Campylobacter-positive cases in the APN group,
showing that 60% of the samples were classified
as Campylobacter
upsaliensis and 40%
as C. jejuni. In the
control group, DNA sequencing was available from 5 of 11 of the Campylobacter-positive
cases showing that 80% were classified as C. upsaliensis and 20% as
C. jejuni. No C. coli was
isolated from any dog in our study.”

It's difficult to see how they can conclude that C. upsaliensis is involved here.

There appears to be nothing in the study that compared different parts of the chicken,
nor whether the chicken in question had been declared fit for human consumption (like
the chicken frames we can get
in Ballarat). The statement
“Chickens are a natural reservoir of Campylobacter, where the bacteria colonize the
mucosal layer of the gastrointestinal tract and can be transferred between chickens by
the fecal-oral route” suggests that they're not affected, but I don't want to just gain
an impression.

Based on that, and despite the limited and apparently one-sided control group, the best
anybody could say is that Campylobacter appears to be involved in APN. That doesn't make it
a cause.

OK, the authors of the current study don't need to agree. But to maintain credibility,
they do need to refer to the study.

They also criticized the sample size and selection criteria of the animals in the
investigation, for the same reasons I stated.

One thing that I didn't catch was that only 48% of dogs with APN had Campylobacter in
their faeces. Why not all of them? And how can this information be used to put the
blame on Campylobacter?

Interestingly, the discussion diverts to the causes
of pancreatitis. Conventional
wisdom has it that its due to too much fat. But the article claims that it can also be due
to too many carbohydrates, more than the dog's digestive system can handle. Given that we
don't give Leo any significant amount of fat (arguably less than he needs), that might be
worth thinking about.

I suppose it's nice to know that—for once—others agree with me. I wonder who the anonymous
person at top right was. It seems that he might have been favourable, possibly somebody on
the team who wrote it.

The other day I found a cricket walking across the floor of the bedroom. OK, collect it,
put it in the fridge to cool it down and slow it down, and take some macro photos.

Unfortunately, the cricket died. Why? The temperature in the fridge was about 5°, which a
cricket should be able to survive with no problems. Am I wrong in that assumption? Or did
it run out of air or moisture? Or would it have died anyway? One way or another, I didn't
have to worry about it moving while taking my focus stacks. Here a couple:

Sad request on Freecycle today: Bruce, the bloke I gave the TV to on Saturday, is looking for a
26" analogue TV. Clearly he didn't get the other working. In the meantime I had heard
from the original person interested in it, so I sent Bruce a message asking if he wanted to
get rid of it. No answer yet.

While I was in Bannockburn,
I asked Greg Coates for copies of the X-ray files, something that they had done in the past. He seemed confused, and
suggested taking photos of the screen of his laptop with a mobile phone! I explained that
this had been done in the past and suggested that he send me the files as email attachments.
He said that he would see what could be done.

Later I received a mail message from Charyn, surname unstated, giving links for the images,
starting with
http://itxviewer.com:8080/itxviewer/index.html. No response from the
server. nmap showed:

So why did they give me port 8080? Does the site only respond to specific IP addresses?
Then I saw the reverse domain: googleusercontent.com. No, they wouldn't do that,
would they? I puzzled for quite some time and came to the conclusion that it could be one
of these silly local fake domains, like I've seen elsewhere: they create an RFC 1918 private network and attach a host
name to it that mirrors a real address on the Internet.

In the meantime, though, I did the more logical thing and asked again to have the images
attached to an email address. And how about them, that's what I got, sort of:

That was taken with a mobile phone, just what I didn't want. Why can't they just send me
the images? I'm sure it's not because they're unwilling. They just don't know how—maybe.
Or they think that I won't be able to process the original images, which—Greg says—are in
some format that I had never heard of, and which I have forgotten. But I'm sure I'll find
image conversion software for it.

The real problem, I suspect, is a general lack of understanding of basic operations like
copying files. That's why we now need to move data to the other end of the world before
bringing it back.

Chris Bahlo had expressed interest
in Jägerschnitzel earlier in the week, so
that's what we had for dinner tonight.

Problem: we don't have a really good recipe. Last time, coincidentally almost
exactly a year ago, I used a recipe that I found on line, but this time I had the desire
(probably encouraged by Chris' recollection of the butcher near the railway station
in Gerolstein, where she used to go
after school) to have more interesting mushrooms. To my surprise I found that Woolworths have fresh oyster mushrooms—not exactly
what you'd find in a German forest—so I chose them.

Quantities? The old question. The recipe I used last time wanted 500 g mushrooms („Champignons“, i.e. normal cultivated
mushrooms) and 4 pork schnitzel of unspecified size. We had 7 Schnitzel, weighing 650 g,
and for that 500 g mushrooms seemed excessive. We had only 150 g oyster mushrooms:

After frying, they diminished a little, so in the end I reconstituted 15 g of
dried porcini and added them.

And the sauce? Again, the recipe looked dubious, so I winged it. 125 g old gravy from last
week, 125 g sour cream. And how about that, it worked well. The only issue was that it
really wasn't enough for our 7 schnitzel. But that was no problem either, because the
schnitzel were too much for us, and the sauce was just right for the 5 that we did eat.

I've spent several days looking for power adapters for my external disks. I've found a
couple on eBay, but they all have
connectors with 2.5 mm internal diameter (“guaranteed to fit both 2.1 mm and 2.5 mm
sockets”). I know better.

But then it occurred to me: ask Chris Bahlo. And sure enough, she had exactly the power
adapter I was looking for, on indefinite loan if not to keep. Finally I had enough
power adapters for all my disks. And then I discovered:

Dammit, it was the disk that Rani destroyed two years ago. So
once again I can't back up my TV shows. Still, that means that there's a companion 4 TB
disk that's still OK: these were my photo backup disks in the days when I could get them all
onto 4 TB. The other one must be at Chris' house. Mañana.

Over to Chris Bahlo's house today to get my backup disk number 6, which I used for my photos
from November 2013 until
March last year, when it became too small (only 4 TB). Since then it's been sitting on a
shelf at Chris' place.

That's just what I need for the video backup I've been working on for the last week or so.
OK, newfs and start backing up.

But what about the content? It contained are all my photos up to a year ago. Yes, I
have three other copies, but what if they're all corrupt? How can I even tell if they're
corrupt at all? First attempt: give up and just compare size and modification timestamp:

Problem: the files weren't in the same sequence. OK, sort them. But somehow there were
still far too many differences. And just because the EOF and modification timestamp are the
same doesn't help: I've seen disk problems that have replaced whole blocks of data with
binary zeroes. The obvious thing is to create checksums when you read them in and compare
them from time to time. Too late for that now, of course, but at least I can compare
checksums.

Started that, but it's slow. After a couple of hours, it became clear that I
wouldn't get finished today.

Dammit, I didn't find any errors. Probably the stuff's OK. If not, I still have the
remains of disk 7. Time for a newfs.

How big is the average file on this disk? It proved to be round 400 MB (after all, most of
the data is videos). So:

That looks better. And a little bit more space—only by comparison: it's a difference of 110
MB. I wonder if the -g flag does anything in addition.

Then off to back up the /spool file system. Problem: teevee doesn't have any
USB 3 ports, and so it ran at a snail's pace, not quite 30 MB/s. How about that, for once
the network is faster: plug the thing into eureka and back up across the network,
where I should be able to get speeds approaching 100 MB/s.

No such luck. For whatever reason, eureka doesn't want to recognize this disk as a
USB 3 disk, so there was no difference. OK, back to teevee. When will the backup be
finished? Tomorrow, hopefully.

Olympus has brought out a new
camera, the E-PL9.
It seems only yesterday that
they brought out the E-PL8, itself not much of an increment on the E-PL7. For the fun of
it, I tried comparing the E-PM2 (Yvonne's camera), the E-PL7 and the E-PL9:

How much difference is there between the E-PL7 and the E-PL9? Very little, it seems. They
have the same sensor resolution. The E-PL9 does 4K video, and it has better image
stabilization. It also has a built-in flash, probably the best thing from my point of view.
Maybe there's something else that I haven't noticed.

But the E-PL9 is missing one thing that the others have: the ability to connect a viewfinder
like my VF-2.
Clearly the jack (under the flash shoe) is expensive, but the ability to connect the
viewfinder is worth quite a bit, to me at any rate.

More and more my objection to “modern” digital devices is pointing in one direction:
inability to manipulate files. Thirteen
years ago I grumbled that this new firefox browser had lost editing functionality. More recently I've been
grumbling about inability to move data from one place to another without going via a server,
more than likely at the other end of the world.

Today I had another example, also involving another rant favourite, Android. I received
an SMS message from somebody, something that
I don't see in a timely manner. And I wanted to answer it. With an SMS? Heaven forbid!
That's what email is for.

So how do I get the message to my email? After two hours of trying, I still don't know.
People on IRC helped a bit until they got fed up with my grumbling. “Cut and paste it!”.
That's a declaration of bankruptcy! But I did learn how to cut and paste, at least
entire texts.

The obvious thing to do would be to go to the messaging app and select “forward to:”,
specifying an email address. But that's an old, worn-out magic word, and modern messaging
apps (not in the Internet space, as Callum Gibson pointed out) want no interoperability with
the Internet.

OK, cut and paste into my mail app. That worked, modulo the pain of toy keyboards, and it
told me that it had sent it. But no message. The “outgoing mail” log (if that's the word)
told me that nothing had been sent. This appears to be an issue with my mail app, though
it's not clear what's wrong.

OK, there must be apps to do this. One installed and accepted my email address, but it
wanted to forward only via mobile phone data. Maybe it can only forward to phone
numbers, and didn't parse the email address enough to realize that something was wrong.

Two other apps seemed better, at least for future SMSs. But they wanted to send only
to specific email addresses, and to use
my Gmail address as the sender. Somehow
this is confusing. I want to send it to me, not from me.

And that's all! Well, no, there were two of them. Was this an SMS? Probably not, just the
notification that I had configured it (twice, because it didn't seem to do anything).
Probably it will only forward future messages.

So: how do people in the Real World do this? My guess is the same way that I have chosen:
give up.

Our Salix babylonica is looking
less than happy. Granted, it's planted (deliberately) in an inappropriate place in the
entrance, but in the last few days the leaves have dried up. Sprinkler problems?

Yes! And they were my fault. After testing the sprinklers last week, I had forgotten to power on
the sprinkler controller again. That's something that I should guard against in the
sprinkler program. As a result, though, nothing had been sprinkled for 5 days.

Turned it on again, and discovered that the solenoid is still sticking. Damn! That
certainly doesn't fulfil the “durability” requirement of
the Trade Practices Act.
Still more annoyances ahead.

The DBDRV has responded to the letter that I wrote them at the beginning
of last month, after only 5 weeks. I had complained about a number of things, including:

The assessor had not addressed all issues that had been raised.

He had ignored important inputs, including fire safety and adjustment instructions,
without even mentioning them in his report.

He had not performed measurements that he had claimed to have done.

There were many more: my letter was 188 lines long. The DBDRV response was shorter:

We confirm that careful consideration has been given to the Owner's submissions and it has
been determined that:

In relation to Item Two, the finding in the Report be amended from "No defect" to
"Undetermined". The reason being that the DBDRV Assessor did not conduct a test
using an anemometer on the day of the assessment and is unable to confirm the rate of
airflow through the range hood.

In relation to Items one, three, four and five, there is no basis for amending the
Report.

And that's all. No mention of nearly all of my issues. What happens if the house burns
down because of a fire caused by the inappropriate range hood? What mention of the fact
that the assessor just plain didn't do his job measuring the floor levels? But clearly the
response itself shows that they consider it normal not to address issues that are raised.

And what about the range hood? One of the issues I had was that he had claimed that the
item was not defective because more than three months had elapsed since handover (a date
that he stated incorrectly, and which still has not been corrected). That's patently
absurd, since I complained 3 weeks after installation. They didn't address this issue, and
they didn't remove it, but they made the change from “no defect” to “undetermined” anyway,
though the statement about the maintenance period would mean that there was no grounds for
any claim. I get the impression that they didn't read the text before changing things.

It was signed by Catherine Clocone, a Legal Adviser. Clearly the purpose of the letter is
to ensure that I can't sue them, though I don't see that it has served its purpose.

I'm disgusted. While I don't believe that they are necessarily biased towards the builders,
they're clearly incompetent to the point of being worse than useless. This is not the first
time that I've seen
the Victorian Government
agencies demonstrate this level of incompetence. If this is the best they can do, they
should close down the entire department.

Even before I have come to terms
with focus stacking, Kev Russell
has come up with the next step: extreme
macro. The site's difficult to navigate and read, so I took the easy way out and
procrastinated. But it occurs to me that there's a big difference between focus stacking
done the Olympus way and
conventional focus stacking done by moving the camera: the first alters the distance between
lens and sensor (v in the lens equation,
which Wikpedia calls S₂), while the latter alters the distance between lens and object
(u or S₁). That doesn't seem to make much difference, but the depth of field is
roughly constant with changing v, while it changes dramatically with
changing u.

My first impression was “yes”, but more careful examination raised doubts. What's that
branched strand on the left? Saffron is made from
the stamens
of Crocus sativus, and they don't
have branches. And the end of the strand at bottom left looks like a dried-out flower.
It's not the only one. Stamens don't have flowers.

They both look different. The one on the left is the saffron, and the one on the
right is the safflower that I received
last July. Neither look
very similar. As expected, the saffron had neither branches nor “flowers”. The safflower
clearly has flowers, but they look different. Could it be a different kind of fake?
Mohamed tells me that it smells strongly and gives him hay fever. Safflower (mine, anyway)
smells of dried grass, while saffron smells strongly of... well, saffron.

Off to Ballarat yet again for shopping
and to take Yvonne to the doctor and physiotherapist.
Everything went smoothly, and I even had time to get to Bunnings, do some shopping, and get back only about
30 seconds late, something that I hadn't really expected.

Another sign of the times: the ANZ bank closed
down its Sebastopol branch a
few months ago, but left
the ATM outside in
operation, as this photo from Google maps shows:

I can understand shutting down branches; it's part of the Internet revolution that I
described in my paper the future of the Internet, though I missed the
issue of specifically banks closing down. But why remove the ATM? That doesn't match the
expectations in my paper. Possibly it's a matter of property ownership, and they're
planning a new ATM somewhere nearby. But why no sign to tell people what has happened, what
is going to happen, and where the next ANZ ATM is? That smacks of stupidity.

So I explained again to him that I wanted him to remove the big weeds so that I could spray
the remains. Came back later to find him trimming the edges of the lawn. So I explained
again to him that I wanted him to remove the big weeds so that I could spray the remains.
Came back later to find that he had been weeding the succulent bed, and had done several
square meters:

By then it was time for him to knock off. While I was talking with him, pulled out several
bushes myself, apparently much faster than he had been doing. Ah, I was lucky and found
soil that was a little moist. Five hours, $175, and he didn't do anything of what I asked
him, and only got about a quarter of the way through the beds. Apart from the fact that I
can't get him to do what I ask, I can't afford this. He's due back next Saturday, but I
think it's time to find another gardener.

Checking with Yvonne about her medication, discovered that
she didn't get a renewal for Celebrex,
an anti-inflammatory, which ran out this morning. Why not? It proved to have been
prescribed by Dr. M. Denton of the Base Hospital, so Paul Smith didn't have any record of it. Call to Health First to talk to Dr. Paul Smith.
Sorry, he's not in today, won't be back until Monday. OK, can some other doctor prescribe
it for her? No, sorry, not without an examination, and we're full today.

More discussion, in which the receptionist wasn't very helpful. She suggested an
appointment on Monday. More discussion. “And so Yvonne spends the weekend in agony? This
is an emergency. What do you do in an emergency?”. She suggested that we go to suggested
that we go to Eureka Medical Centre! What, doesn't Health First deal with emergencies? Yes,
but mumble (I really had difficulties understanding her speech). After a while, I
persuaded her to ask a doctor, and they would get back to me.

In the meantime, Yvonne called the Base Hospital, who told her that they couldn't prescribe
anything because the case had been handed over to
the GP.

Five hours later, at 13:57, I called again and was told that they couldn't do anything
because mumble wasn't back from lunch, and she had talked to Dr. Chewey, who was with
a patient, and so we would have to wait. mumble was due back in 15 minutes, and
their appointments were calculated for 20 minutes each, so it seemed reasonable to expect a
call back in half an hour.

Half an hour later I called back again and was connected with mumble, who told me
that her name was Gail, that she was a nurse, and that she was having difficulty because the
Base Hospital hadn't sent them the records. Called the number specified on Yvonne's next
appointment (orthopaedics, 5320-4221), and got the information that they could get the
records department to fax the details again. Shortly later got a call back from Gail
to say that she had been trying all afternoon to contact the records department, but was
only getting voice mail.

There must be something that can be done in an emergency. Called up the main number and
asked for the number of the records department, but that's secret. While I was talking to
the receptionist, got a call on the other line from Jacinta Smith, a
coordinator in some unspecified department, who told me that Health First was being
unreasonable, but that she would fax them the letter of 31 January. I asked about
the admission records, but no, they don't give that information to the GPs.

Called back to Health First. Yes, they had received the letter of 31 January, but they
already had it. What they needed were the admission records, which are normally sent as a
matter of course.

Somehow we're going round in circles here. People are so tied up with bureaucracy that they
have lost sight of the fact that there's a potential emergency here. Decided to give up and
take Yvonne to the emergency department of the Base Hospital. Called Health First again and
asked Rebecca to tell Gail that she should call us on my mobile number if she needed us.

Half way to Ballarat, got a call from
Gail, who had heard nothing from Rebecca, but had somehow found my mobile number anyway
after two failed attempts at home. She had finally found the records, stored in a place she
wasn't expecting. So finally we picked up our script round 15:45. A whole day
chasing up the prescription!

I originally had yellow and red flowering Mirabilis, and what I have seen suggests that they
will cross-pollinate and create other colours, including stripes. But not here, it seems.
I still only have the same two colours:

Yesterday's discussion about saffron
continued today. Mohamed Ifadir came up with an interesting page with far more
detail about the saffron harvest than I had known before. In particular, various parts of
the stamen are used for differing
qualities:

Firstly, the ends of the stamens are really wider, and there's some reason to believe
something might protrude from them, like in this detail of Mohamed's photo that showed
yesterday:

What time did we pick up the prescription at Health Firstyesterday? It was somewhere between
15:30 and 16:00, but I didn't note the exact time.

Never mind, I have a GPS navigator—two, in fact—so I can use something like GPS Visualizer to show where I was. But that shows two serious issues. First, the track is extremely
inaccurate. In Ballarat, we parked
between Eyre St and Dana St, a block south of Health First, and walked north along the west
side of Doveton St. When we left (by car), we turned left into Dana St and left again into
Dawson St. The track tells a different story:

The other thing is that this view doesn't tell me when I was (supposed to be) there.
Sure, I can look in the raw log, but that way madness lies. It's
in UTC, so I should be looking at the time
between 5:30 and 6:00:

And that would tell me, if I could visualize it. Maybe the <speed> specification can
help. Those values suggest that, at the very least, we were not in a car. But wouldn't it
be nice to find a good visualizer? I'm sure they're out there, but how do I find a good one?

I spent a fair amount of time looking
at saffron yesterday, but I didn't get
round to looking at all the details. The Flora saffron pages have
measurements for their saffron, along with values according to ISO 3632. ISO
politely refuses to divulge the values (cross their palms with silver), but Flora gives what
are presumably correct details. According to that, we have (ISO specification in brackets):

Well, that's helpful, isn't it? All the values are the same. What differs is the spelling.
On the page for Poushal, we also have the spellings “Pushali”, and the link itself uses the spelling “Pushal”.

The Style of the saffron plant, has less CULINARY VALUE, that means less AROMA, FLAVOR or
COLOR. If is left attached to the red stigmas, it adds 30% to 50% DEAD weight to the
saffron flower, and you pay for it.

But the analysis? The same as the others. My guess is that the >= is the most important
part of the pages.

One of my garden sprinklers is still sticking, but the people at UPI had suggested that it might just be dirt in
the valve. Why that? I have a filter in front of it, and I never had issues like that in
Kleins Road. But out to take a look this morning, marveling at the way the valve had been
installed so that it was difficult to access the solenoid: